Well Expanderrr has moved to servus.at, the one real Host and Hub for Linz based cultural initiatives, artists and other open-source – sharing – collaboration orientated individuals and groups.

During the relocation and even much longer expanderrr.org, still hosted on tumblr will stay online, but we will not maintain it anymore.

Hopefully we will have completed our migration soon and if things work well we should be able to transfer even the old posts from tumblr into our new virtual base.

Meanwhile we will post most important news on both sites!

The most important in the moment, that we changed our communication too:

You can reach us using expanderrr@servus.at, the other, older email adresses will not be maintained, but we will forward messages from there to our new account.

As you will recognise we still use a blog blueprint for our presence, we do not like that very much, but unfortunately we do not have the skills to do it in a different way yet and there are many other things to be done, but if you know well how to use e.g. drupal and want to offer collaborative help with these things feel free to contact us, we want to learn and we still believe that we should expand

LiWoLi is a community festival, open lab and annual meeting spot for artists, educators and developers using and creating Free Software (FLOSS), Open Hardware and Open Design in the artistic and cultural context. This event is all about sharing artistic skills, code and knowledge within the public domain and discussing the challenges of an open practice.

This year’s edition had a special focus on artworks that could be created, performed or exhibited outdoors and in public space and EXPANDERRR conducted a workshop on Swarming behaviour performance.

Very often the concept of swarming is used to notice and to find rule-sets or algorythms to rpedict individual behaviour in certain situations, as in public spaces and the impact of one´s individual self-perception when there is a set of rules that shape the swarming behaviour.

We wanted to go further using the concept of swarming as a basic set; enhancing it so we could collect individual notions and sense a societal and personal feedback on response to our collecitve action.

In the first phase of the workshop we introduced the swarming practice and the concept of city swarming as tool for social sculpture, challenge of the power and condition shaping behavior in different types of public space as to develop a series of swarming “performances” in public space. Therefor Phase I included the decision on the set of rules that would organize the swarming behavior and subsequently the swarms collective behavior.

The second phase was the swarming performance itself and the sensing part of it. It was the time to take consciousness of self-feelings, notions and reactions caused by the swarm.

To compare and discuss what as swarm particles we sensed and detected was the first outcome of our performance, yet receiving very good feedback from the participants and soon to be updated this part of the expierence, we already plan to make a second swarm workshop at the begining of juli!

RELATIONAL ART & OPEN SPACE EXHIBITION.

“Every social relationship is mediated by artifacts or human elements intervene decisively in the relationship …)”[1].

So we face an interactive installation in which the user through of ludic-interface, hybrid of tennis racket and computer keyboard, processes by random the information stored in the computer, instant results in a fortuitous sequence of videos and sounds.

The Open Containerrr project is physically over. We would like to give special thanks to Luger & Maul Architekten and Linzer Schutzengel Apotheke for letting us use this awesome space to hold our project.

Thanks too to the Interface Culture Dept and “Exile Atelier” at Kollegiumgasse for loaning us lights and electric equipment, couch and chairs and holding neverending Expanderrr meetings!

More thanks to MISSING LINK, Lessingstraße 10, for holding our end party! As well as Jules & Jim, Dj J and GRAMPAUMBRA for such a nice evening; a gift.

Finally thank’s and greets to all those who dropped and joined the different lectures, workshops, our exhibition and party; sharing and collaborating with us, interacting and unfolding such interesting, indefinable and exciting results.

The Workshop is not yet closed in terms of topic, as the main approach of the whole project is relational art, the workshop will be devoted in terms of it’s directional setting to be open to be shaped, both, in terms of topics and goals and third in decision taking of the modus operandi. Short put, the participants will decide like a flock of birds the direction of the collaborative process according to the needs and expectations of the participants and in respect of the limited given mains of production.

Fortunately Enrique Tomas (Quique), a member of servus.at, will participate at the workshop and will offer his ideas and knowldege too, what will enrich the workshop tremendously, as he is really offering a lot of expertise in various techniques and branches, both, of open source thougt and commitment and audio-arts.

MIchael Schweiger will provide the Soundstudio’s portable Studio, Mics and Recorders, some small speakers, one or two analog mixing desks and some piezo disks (yet prepared to use and some to be soldered and coated wirh liquid ruber) and some other mains for experiments, like breadboards and some circuit schematics and literature full of playful little basic experiments…

And of course both will share his approaches and ideas, as well as their love for audio works and audible experiments. They”d like to go for a group-work process leading to make the comtainer sound and interact with it’s surround. But this is merely a proposal.